Colour Grading for beginners

N

nathanjrb

Active member
Hi,

I've been honing my Premiere Pro and After Effects skills for a couple of years now - and I'd really like to work on colour grading, as I've got the impression that this is what can really make footage look professional.

Can anyone recommend a good place to get started with Adobe Speedgrade? Also - where does SG fit in the workflow exactly? Do I grade footage as soon as I've taken the shots off my camera? Intermittently as I edit in PP? or at the end of editing, once I have my shots together?

Also any hints and tips you can think of is appreciated.

Many thanks,

Nath
 
I don't know much about speedgrade - but Davinci Lite is free and supremely powerful. And there are about a thousand tutorials out there, some by major colorists.

It's really "the" tool, and the free version is about 90% of the full version.
 
Youtube should turn up a few tutorials. Spent a couple hours and you'll be set. Also, Adobe TV is a good place to start. Speedgrade is great! I love being able to round trip without rendering like you would have to with non Adobe options. The mask tracking is powerful, and the keying is great! Use LUTs and more.
 
Thanks all! I'll take a look on You Tube! I'm currently working on one monitor, but I'm looking to add a second shortly! Can anyone recommend one I should look at? Around the£100-200 mark.
 
michael-

any idea as to what mac specs are needed to run davinci lite?

i have an mac pro 3,1 8-core with stock graphics card.

any info would be appreciated.

thanks in advance.

be well.

rob
smalltalk productions/nyc


Michael Carter said:
I don't know much about speedgrade - but Davinci Lite is free and supremely powerful. And there are about a thousand tutorials out there, some by major colorists.

It's really "the" tool, and the free version is about 90% of the full version.
Click to expand...
 
Hi Nath

No intention of hijacking your post, just saying thanks for putting the post for me to lock on to and thanks to M Carter for the Davinci tip - just downoad the 11 Beta and gave a mention to the DVXUser Forum. No idea what beng a colourist is yet but.....

Thanks
 
I've been using Colorista II for a while and I am pretty impressed by it. I wonder if in Professional Color Grading it is assumed you always work with RAW files? I've only worked with RAW files a couple of times, but it seems to me most other formats would fall dismally short when in comes
to Color Grading.
 
EDV said:
I've been using Colorista II for a while and I am pretty impressed by it. I wonder if in Professional Color Grading it is assumed you always work with RAW files? I've only worked with RAW files a couple of times, but it seems to me most other formats would fall dismally short when in comes
to Color Grading.
Click to expand...

No.

Granted, the crappier the codec, the crappier your results may be - but ProRes or DNXHD can be easily graded with fabulous results (or even lesser codecs like h264 can be used with more than acceptable results if you know what you are doing both while shooting and while grading).
 
EDV said:
I've been using Colorista II for a while and I am pretty impressed by it. I wonder if in Professional Color Grading it is assumed you always work with RAW files? I've only worked with RAW files a couple of times, but it seems to me most other formats would fall dismally short when in comes
to Color Grading.
Click to expand...

The best results usually come from going back to the camera originals. If you shot on DSLR, for example, there are no "raw" files, only h264 in some sort of wrapper. And even at the high end, many films made on the Alexa shoot to ProRes rather than to raw because of the streamlined workflow.
 
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